Safe Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 1 New Research and Implications for SIF Prevention Introduction The notion that leadership matters to organizational safety is intuitive for most people. Over the years, we have accumulated a thorough understanding of certain aspects of safety leadership, what excellence looks like, and how that leads to safety improvement. Countless books have been written, leadership assessments have been developed, and organizations have entire programs dedicated to developing the safety leadership skills of their employees. Despite this progress, safe decision making is an aspect of leadership that has not received enough attention. Until recently, we...

It’s been nearly a decade since our first study on serious injury and fatality prevention explained why so many companies were seeing recordable injuries improve, while fatal injuries were level or increasing. Dr. Tom Krause, with collaborators from 9 global organizations studied the problem in 2010. They concluded that the disturbing trend was the result of differences in the precursors which lead to serious injuries and fatalities compared to other types of injuries. This work demonstrated that the traditional approach to safety improvement is ill-advised. For decades, the strategy was to reduce exposure at the bottom of the safety triangle...

It’s been nearly a decade since our first SIF study explained why so many companies were seeing recordable injuries improve while fatal injuries were level or increasing. Dr. Tom Krause, with collaborators from 9 global organizations studied the problem in 2010. They concluded that the disturbing trend was the result of differences in the situations leading to serious and fatal injuries compared to other types of injuries. This work demonstrated that the traditional approach to safety improvement is ill-advised. For decades, the strategy was to reduce exposure at the bottom of the safety triangle in hopes that serious and fatal...

Deepwater Horizon began showing in United States theaters on September 30. As with most historical films, the post-release flurry of critique and dialogue about the film’s accuracy has ensued, and BP’s blunders have become a conversation topic around most dinner tables. While we all love a great villain, and the portrayal of BP fits so well into our definition of evil, the basic formula of a good movie, by design, does not leave much room for the complexities of reality. At most, it serves as an opportunity to have a deeper conversation about the multitude of factors that orchestrate such...

Over the past two decades, many leading organizations have achieved consistent improvement in injury prevention. On average, US private companies reduced their injury rates by 62% between 1994 and 2014. But those dramatic reductions in injuries haven’t translated into reductions in workplace fatalities, which dropped by just 34% in the same period. For a mid-sized organization, this trend might be experienced as years of excellent safety performance followed by a devastating series of serious and fatal (SIF) events. It has been more than a decade since we first reported that traditional efforts to prevent harm in the workplace have been less...

You've see the astounding numbers: hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year due to medical treatment errors. Indeed, the median credible estimate is 350,000, more than U.S. combat deaths in all of World War II. If you measure the “value of life” the way economists and federal agencies do it – that is, by observing how much individuals voluntarily pay in daily life to reduce the risk of accidental death – those 350,000 lives represent a loss exceeding $3 trillion, or one-sixth of GDP. But when decades pass and little seems to change, even these figures lose their power...